


History Painting

by M_Leigh



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Art History, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-War, World War II, happy birthday steve, museums i have known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 12:19:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1898775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“We’ll go there one day,” Bucky adds a moment later, back to his bright self again, grinning, cocky. “All those fucking places with all that fucking art. You can tell me all about it. Paintings and sculptures and all that crap.”</i>
</p><p>A chronicle of looking at art across the decades, and two birthdays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	History Painting

**Author's Note:**

> Originally on [tumblr](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/post/90793773701/morgan-leigh-1-steve-doesnt-know-how-it) for the Fourth of July. The most depressing Steve Rogers birthday fanwork of them all.
> 
> There's an object mentioned at one point in this story that I found on eBay, fortuitously. The slideshow of images contained therein wouldn't embed here, so I STRONGLY suggest clicking through one of the links to look at it. Otherwise the images are all embedded here.
> 
> Thanks to my high school art history teacher for teaching me everything I know.

_The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art._

\--Ernst Gombrich

  

****

 

**1.**

  
Steve doesn’t know how it happened, the two of them becoming adults. Maybe they aren’t yet. He’s never really been sure: how can you tell? He doesn’t feel like it, always, doesn’t feel like it when Bucky is doing something stupid: pulling a face at him, eyes crossed, sitting on the floor in the dark with just the one light on and a bottle of beer in his hands, cracking up, being an idiot. That does not make Steve feel like a grown-up. But then, also, there is drifting from job to job, trying to make a little money doing anything at all, trying to trick Bucky into eating more when he comes home sweaty and exhausted—which never works—and the fact that his mother is in the ground and won’t ever come out of it again, except in his head, when he’s asleep, until he wakes up and he’s alone except for Bucky sleeping across the tiny little room, slow and even, curled up tight like always, like a kid. He doesn’t really know about any of it. His ma had him when she was twenty-one and he never met his father, not once; he died overseas. He and Bucky are nineteen now. Neither of them is going to be having a kid in two years, that’s for sure. Steve doesn’t know where they’ll be. In this room, probably, if they don’t get thrown out. If they aren’t both dead.

“Come on,” Bucky says, swinging himself out of the window and then sticking his head back in. “Reconnaissance mission, pal.”

“What are we reconnaissancing,” Steve says, following him and climbing out with decidedly less grace.

“Not a word,” Bucky says, starting to climb the steps of the fire escape. “We’re _doing reconnaissance_ on the roof.”

Steve looks up at the roof of their building, a few stories up. “Sure,” he says, and starts climbing up after him.

It’s hot, sticky, the worst kind of summer weather: the city’s waiting for a storm that hasn’t come yet and in the meantime everyone is sweaty, rank, red in the face. In the night it’s better, but not by as much as it feels like it should be, and Steve’s been lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, his shirt and shorts feeling unbearably heavy, breathing shallow. It’s hard to decide whether the summer or the winter is worse, for his terrible excuse for a body: easier to say instead that the few brief weeks of spring and fall are better, are the only times that are truly good.

Bucky stays up, he knows, and listens to him. He wishes he wouldn’t. If Bucky is always listening then when is he supposed to sleep? And if Bucky doesn’t sleep—well. If Bucky doesn’t sleep.

“Here,” Bucky says, having swung himself easily over the top of the fire escape up to the roof. He holds down his arm—his arm which is sweating like the rest of him, like the rest of Steve, like the rest of every other body in New York—and grins.

“I’m fine,” Steve says, fingers folding over the metal.

“Don’t be stupid,” Bucky says. “What’s that they say, pride comes before a fall? Literal, in this case.”

Steve glares at him and grabs his forearm, thick with muscle, and lets himself be pulled up and over.

It’s sloped, and metal, uncomfortably hot, but their feet can rest on the brick edge and they can lie back and look at the sky, the few pinpricked stars visible beyond the haze of the city light, and look out toward Manhattan, at the brief bursts of crackling light popping up everywhere and then fizzling out, people shouting and singing faintly from the far-off streets.

“They’re celebrating your birthday,” Bucky says, that same old horrible joke, and Steve groans and shoves him, carefully, to make sure he won’t fall.

“What better occasion for all this fuss?” Bucky asks, gesturing out at the spluttering fireworks, the noise. He settles back down next to Steve, warmer than the roof, even, where he’s pressed against him. “You’re more exciting than some Declaration of Independence, I’m telling you.”

“What about the Constitution?” Steve asks, turning to look at him as seriously as possible, down his nose.

“Now the Constitution, that’s competitive,” Bucky says. “That’s a real document.”

“Glad to know how I rank,” Steve says, and Bucky grins at him, lopsided and bright.

“Best of three, you against the constitution,” Bucky says. “I’d watch that fight.”

“Do we want to get rid of the Constitution now?” Steve asks. “Not very patriotic of you.”

Bucky shrugs. “I’m not political,” he says. “Which is why I’d rank you above all that crap.”

“Shut it,” Steve mutters, looking back out at Brooklyn.

“I got something for you, by the way,” Bucky says, sitting up properly, and Steve looks at him, fingers curling together.

“Bucky,” he says, and Bucky shakes his head.

“Don’t start with me,” he says. “All right? It’s nothing, I promise, I’ve been fucking sitting on it.”

He slides something out of his pocket and looks at it for a second before handing it over to Steve, who sits up to take it from him. “I guess it’s fucking dark out so you can’t see it anyway.”

 

 

But Steve can, well enough; it’s never very dark here at night, even in this far-away part of town. It’s a little [red and green book](http://www.ebay.com/itm/1920s-Italy-Florence-Firence-Uffizi-Gallery-32-Picture-Views-Arts-Sculpture-/260967570148) with a drawing of Mary on the front, arms out over Jesus as a baby, with something Italian written on it. He cracks it open and [flips slowly through, one page after another](http://www.photosnack.com/my-slideshows/details/pdnios58?jsalbum=1): painting after painting that all must be housed in some ancient building halfway around the world, black and white here, there presented in vivid color: so many Madonnas and all of their children, some of them young and some of them dead, and some women looking straight out at him, and some covering their nakedness as they come out of the sea, and some holding men’s heads as they run with blood.

Bucky’s sitting next to him, watching, hands knotting nervously together. “I don’t—I found it at one of those street vendors, you know, out in the city, I thought—I thought you’d like having it, you know, to look at.”

“You shouldn’t have spent—however much you spent on it,” Steve says, turning it over in his hands, running his fingers along the edges. Bucky shrugs.

“Yeah, well,” he says, bringing his knees up and putting his arms around them. “I did, didn’t I? So you should just—enjoy it, all right? And don’t go feel fucking guilty about it.”

Steve splays his hand over the cover and leans into him again. “Thanks,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” Bucky says, not quite looking at him.

“We’ll go there one day,” he adds a moment later, back to his bright self again, grinning, cocky. “All those fucking places with all that fucking art. You can tell me all about it. Paintings and sculptures and all that crap.”

“Like I’m some kind of expert,” Steve says dryly.

“More’n me, that’s for sure,” Bucky says. “That’s Florence, right? That’s what it says in there. I checked. So we’ll go to Florence, and Rome, and Paris, and look at art, and eat so much we’re practically sick, and find nice French and Italian girls and win them over with our American charm—”

“Well, _now_ you’ve pushed yourself beyond the limits of belief,” Steve says, and Bucky pushes against him.

“Well, we _will_ go,” he says, stubborn. “I’m telling you. I can fucking _feel_ it. We’re not gonna stay in this goddamn shithole of a building our whole lives, I can tell you that much.”

“Sure, Bucky,” Steve says, and Bucky pulls a face.

“I expect better,” he says. “Try again.”

“Yes, sir, Captain Barnes, sir,” Steve says, eyes wide, and Bucky collapses back onto the roof, practically rolling around with delight. Steve just looks at him blithely until Bucky grabs him and pulls him down, too, and they’re staring at the sky again.

“You’ll see,” Bucky says. “It’s all gonna be all right, Steve.”

“Yeah,” he says, and both their heads turn as somebody starts setting off bigger fireworks down by the docks. Bucky shifts around to watch, big body folded around Steve’s, and Steve doesn’t bother moving, just settles back against him, head tucked against Bucky’s shoulder, Bucky’s hot breath against his hair, even though it’s July in New York, and everything is hot, and sweaty, and they both smell, and neither of them is talking about the thing they should maybe be talking about. It doesn’t matter, he thinks. They’re never going to go to Europe. They are never going to get out of this city, out of their small exhausting lives, and he’s never going to see any of the paintings in this miraculous little book in person—but Bucky is here, all muscle and firm bone, and Steve is twenty years old, and he hasn’t died yet. So it’s all right, he thinks. For now, it’s all right.

 

**2.**

 

****

  
“I gotta tell you,” Bucky says, “I never thought, if we saw any of this stuff, it’d be under the fucking ground.”

“We don’t let just anyone in here, you know,” a small man with large spectacles, a lumpy sweater, and an uneven mustache tells them, looking nervous. He is, Steve reflects, exactly what you would expect from a person in his position.

“I know,” he says. “We really appreciate it.”

“We’re uncultured yokels,” Bucky says.

“Well,” the man says, looking faint. “For Captain America—”

Bucky smiles, all teeth. “Anything for good ol’ Captain America, that’s for sure,” he agrees, and Steve steps on his foot as he walks by.

“ _Jesus_ ,” he hisses, and limps along for a few steps behind him. “You weigh a whole lot more now than you used to, pal.”

“I know,” Steve says, and leaves it at that.

“All right, all right,” Bucky mutters. “I’ll appreciate the fucking culture.”

All the paintings are pushed up against each other, the light coming from the ceiling dim, yellow. He can see the glimmer of the paint from this close—closer than he’s ever been able to get in a museum, on the rare occasions that they’ve gone. Bucky stands over his shoulder and doesn’t say anything for a long time, as they make their way down the line: old faces, long dead; old places, long-since churned up and built over, everything gone except some of those buildings—and now Europe is a continent of bombs, of streets blown apart, of buildings crumbled into ash, bodies blown apart into nothing at all. Blood, maybe. Fragments of bone.

 

  
“This guy never fucking saw a human person, huh,” Bucky says, and startles a laugh out of him. “Look at the size of that guy’s head compared to the rest of his body.”

“Maybe it’s just his—turban thing,” Steve says magnanimously. “It’s pretty big.”

“Okay, that dude on the ground,” Bucky says, pointing at a figure on the ground, under the mess of horses and knights, lances out, all engaged in combat. “Look at his little legs sticking out this way and his huge fucking body all in front of him.”

“I guess they weren’t very good at perspective yet,” Steve says, laughing. “Look, he was practicing with all those lances, pointing straight at us.”

“Christ,” Bucky says. “What an embarrassment.”

“I dunno,” Steve says. “It’s kind of striking.”

Bucky looks at it for another long second. “He never fucking went to war,” he says eventually, voice hard. There’s stubble all across his face and bags under his eyes. They’ve both got their helmets under their arms and they both smell foul. “Why are we going to fucking Wales?” Bucky had asked, the day before. “Hydra tech turned up in a sub,” Peggy had told them, sounding terse. “We don’t recognize it. We thought you might. And we’re certainly not going to bring it here.”

He’d looked at it, weirdly shaped guns and other unsettling devices whose purpose nobody could fathom, and shaken his head. “Never seen any of it,” he’d said tersely, and walked out of the room, and now they were here, underground, looking at art, while somewhere miles away Howard Stark is poking at whatever it was that made Bucky’s face go tight and pinched, and hopefully not making it explode.

Steve looks at the painting again. There’s no blood anywhere that he can see, and no dead: just the one man on the ground, face down, about to be walked on by a horse.

“Probably not,” he agrees, and they keep going.

Neither of them says much until they’re deep in the back, and they come to it, tucked away in spite of it being so very tall: the Madonna in blue, with John and the angel and her child, and the rocks behind them. They stop at the same time, and stare at it.

 

  
“It make you think of her?” Bucky asks eventually, and Steve swallows, and nods. He has seen pictures of this painting before, and it has always made him think of her: the way she used to turn her head to look at him, or at Bucky; the soft curl of her hair. Now, the veil that seems to fall before the image: he is not like them, or they are not like him, somehow—his mother is in a garden in front of the rocks somewhere, too, and sometimes he thinks if he could just find the right key and the right door he could open it up and find her there, walk through into the place where she is—but the door is shut. And the garden of rocks is the threads of memory that exist only in his mind, and Bucky’s. And even if a door opened before him right now—even if the door were the painting—he would not walk through. He would turn and bury his face in Bucky’s shoulder instead, and wait for it to shut, and for the temptation to pass. For there is no place amongst the dead for the still-living, and the hope of meeting the dead again once they have passed is but a figment of a dream—but it is an inevitable one. And so Steve swallows.

“You still believe in god?” Bucky asks, voice not doing much of anything at all, and Steve just shrugs, remembering all those Sundays spent in a pew, in his childhood, before she died, looking up at a ceiling that seemed impossibly far away, at people that seemed impossibly huge.

“I stopped believing in god a long time ago,” Steve says, and turns around, and walks back out into the day.

“You know, I think I liked the culture,” Bucky says when he catches up and finds him kicking around a rock with his shoe. He leans against the quarry wall, arms folded in front of him. “We could be real cultured guys, you know. I mean, you are already, no offense intended.”

Steve rolls his eyes.

“You’ve got _music_ on your side, and all that,” Bucky leers. “How’s it go? _He’s a star-spangled man_ —”

“I will knock you unconscious,” Steve says. “Don’t think I won’t do it. I’ve got practice.”

Bucky sniggers, and kicks a rock at him. “Anyhow, they tell me there’s a bunch of stuff in some subway station they ain’t using. All those Parthenon marbles. From Greece.”

“Uh huh,” Steve says, thinking of Bucky in the Met, sixteen, posing ludicrously next to various statues, flexing his budding muscles, trying to look serious and failing.

“Dernier tells me they’re all really about men fucking,” Bucky says, raising an eyebrow. “Except with horses.”

“Centaurs,” Steve corrects automatically.

“I see you’re an expert,” Bucky says. Steve stares at him for a moment.

“I’m an expert in propaganda, armed combat, and centaur-fucking,” he says. “You’ve got me.”

Bucky throws back his head and laughs, and laughs, and laughs. The line of his throat is very long, even if it is dirty, and patchily stubbled.

“Nobody fucking believes me when I tell them about you,” he says. “They all think I’m the funny one. They have no fucking idea.”

“I’m not funny,” Steve says. “I’m just provoked.”

“You fucking son of a bitch,” Bucky says, rubbing at the back of his neck, and slinging his helmet back on. “Christ. Here we fucking are. Here we fucking are in fucking Wales. Jesus.”

“We’re here,” Steve says. “We are here.”

“Well,” Bucky says. “I did tell you.”

“You did,” Steve says, and suddenly has to try very hard not to cry.

 

**3.**

It’s good, Steve thinks, that they’ve missed his birthday by a couple of weeks—good that they spent that entire day holed up in a basement in Sevastopol, listening to ex-Hydra agents walking around upstairs while the bones in Steve’s legs knitted themselves together excruciatingly slowly. It’s hard to think about anything extraneous when your leg is making itself whole again and there are people who might want to kill you (and whom you’d like to kill) just feet above your head. It’s hard to think about much at all.

Now they’re in Italy in late July, the height of summer, sun glaring off the white stone of the buildings—it’s practically white, anyway; it seems that way to him—and it is no longer his birthday but it might as well be. He wishes sometimes that he could excise parts of his brain—not forever, not for always, just for a while. It would make things so much easier. He wishes this sometimes because he cannot help himself, and then feels something inside of him twist, sharp and nauseous, and makes himself think about every horrible thing that has ever happened to him, every horrible thing he has ever done, until it is all rattling around in his skull, an endless insomniac cacophony in the dark. It’s not like he needs much sleep anyway.

They are in Italy in the summer, and the sun is hot on his skin, and the girls are pretty in their dresses, and the food is so far from anything he ever ate at home that he can’t really believe it, still—and Bucky is here, somewhere. So everything that he once foretold has come to pass, in the worst possible way, and if Steve could be back there, in that fetid apartment the year he turned twenty, skinny and sickly and starving and poor, he would go. He would go and he would do something, anything, to keep Bucky from that unit, from that lab table where he had found him, eyes empty, reciting numbers; he would do anything in his power keep them from their fates. He would erase it. He never thought that he would think this: for he was always told there is no place among the dead for those living. But he was never told anything about what occurs when those who have passed make a place for themselves among those who still yet breathe. And Bucky is not the only man who has been resurrected.

“This is supposed to be our vacation, man,” Sam says, and he turns and looks at him, dragging his attention away from the corners, the windows, the doors. “Our morning of vacation from manhunting. Appreciate the culture. Look at the art. Relax.”

“I’m not very good at relaxing,” Steve tells him.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that,” Sam says, looking back down at the museum guide, which he’s opened up to its maximum, truly remarkable size. “You must be real fun at parties.”

“I light up the room,” Steve says, glancing behind them again.

“Stop it,” Sam says, even though when Steve looks back at him it doesn’t appear that he’s moved. “I’m serious. You need a fucking break. You didn’t come with me to the other thing the other day, I am forcing you to do this. It’s gonna take, like, an hour, max. You can handle it.”

This is true: Steve had refused to go into the Uffizi, had instead sat on the steps for hours and hours in the blistering sun, waiting, waiting, hoping that something would happen, that someone with a face he had known once would appear—and of course nothing had. The little red and green book— _Firenze: Gallerie Pitti e Uffizi_ —is at the Smithsonian now, in a glass case, where nobody can open it up to look at the pictures inside. He guesses it doesn’t much matter; everything is on the internet. He could probably ask for it back, and make them give it to him, but he hasn’t tried. It doesn’t seem to matter. He doesn’t seem to belong to himself anymore—not that version, the one they have historicized and mythologized and put into boxes and files and microfilm and internet archives, and not the new version, either. This is, he supposes, the first thing he has really done for himself since waking. And it doesn’t really feel voluntary, either.

He hadn’t been able to explain it to Sam, the refusal to go into the building: what could he say? He did not want to see what was inside if Bucky were not there with him. Stupid sentimentality. But there it was.

Now he is standing in a museum that is technically still the Uffizi but not the Uffizi that Bucky gave him, in a book, seventy years before, following Sam through unsettling close rooms full of old things that have somehow, improbably, survived all these many awful years of war and upset that have passed since their creation. Musical instruments gone silent, painting after painting hung too close together on a dark wall, made unremarkable by their number, and by their having been kept here, in this city and country of masterpieces. He cannot look at any of them and really see them. He thinks about turning to Sam and telling him that this reminds him in a way of that room deep beneath the ground in Wales, where he and Bucky stood alone in front of great works of art and breathed their breath on them, holding their helmets as if out of respect, but how to do that without widening the chasm between them? In those years Sam was so far from being born that it makes Steve sick, sometimes, to think about it.

But soon enough they are in great wide spaces of light, and marble, and Sam is opening his mouth in a way that Steve has come to recognize, and so he says, “Sam, I swear to god, if you tell me one more historical fact that you read on some travel website on the internet, I am going to bust your skull in.”

Sam looks at him, supremely unperturbed.

“Next time I’m sending you on a plane to Fiji,” Sam says. “See how you do there.”

“I’d divert the plane,” Steve says, scanning the people scattered around the room. It’s not that crowded—they came early. Still. Still. “I’m good at that.”

“Horse tranquilizers,” Sam mutters, and moves along, leaving Steve with the statues.

 

  
He remembers these, now that he’s looking at them: he saw them in a book once, years ago. Not that long, really, to him. He hasn’t thought about them in what feels like a long time, though. There are a lot of things he hasn’t been able to think about in a long time.

Some of them are more finished than others: muscled men pulling themselves out of the marble that contains them, that made them; defined, chiseled. And some of them don’t look finished at all, just the echoes of bodies inside something that hasn’t yet and won’t ever release them. They’re supposed to be waking up, the placard says—but they are always going to be stuck in that endless moment just before consciousness. Purgatorial space. An arm over a face.

The worst part, he thinks, is that he knows exactly what Bucky would have said, if they had somehow come here, all those years before: he would have said something lewd, made a crack about Michelangelo—wasn’t he, _you know_ —and then been even more unbearable when they got to the David. And Steve would have laughed. But instead he is standing here and thinking about Bucky inside of the ice, and this, too, is something he can never unthink, can never unknow.

“Hey, come on,” Sam says, and Steve looks up, blinks. Sam’s standing at the end of the hall, close to the David, which is massive on a scale that Steve had never begun to imagine. “Looks like you.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah,” he says. “Ten of me, maybe.”

“Nicer ass,” Sam says.

“Thanks,” Steve says.

“I call it like I see it,” Sam says, and looks at him sideways. “Hey, you were a big artist, back in the day, weren’t you?”

“They always play that up,” Steve says. “Makes for a good story, I guess. I liked to draw. I was—I mean, I was pretty good. I wasn’t some kind of prodigy or anything.”

“They got some of your stuff up there, you know,” Sam says. “At the museum.”

“I know,” Steve says. “I’ve seen it.”

“You were good,” Sam says. “I mean, for real.”

“Well, it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” Steve says. “We were too poor for that. And I didn’t really know anything about art, is what I’m trying to say. I just—you know.”

 

  
Sam looks back up at the David, the frown creasing his forehead. “I never got the expression before,” he says. “In the books he just seems like, you know. Like his face isn’t doing much of anything.”

Steve looks up at the statue. He’s looks like he’s about to face down an army. “Seems about right,” he says.

“David’s supposed to be a little guy,” Sam says. “Look at this dude. I wasn’t joking when I said he looked like you, you know.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, and feels his face do something that might be a smile. “And he even had Jonathan.”

Sam looks at him for a long moment, and then looks away. Steve turns back to the room one last time— _anything, anything, please_ —but there are only tourists, and the light from the morning, and Michelangelo’s Slaves, straining against the confines of their marble, frozen, screaming without making a sound.

 

**4.**

  
Perhaps the strangest thing about twenty-first century New York, in Steve’s experience, is taking cabs everywhere: once his face got out on television the subway was a lost cause, and after Bucky came back he gave up any hope of being able to return to some semblance of normal, anonymous life on public transport at any point in the near future. So they take a lot of cabs, though technically this means they take a lot of cars from a Brooklyn car service that Tony Stark owns and staffs personally. “Don’t be a fucking idiot, Rogers,” he’d said, and then they never spoke of it again.

Bucky is leaning his head against the window now, body practically prone, and Steve is spending more time watching him than watching the city go by: it’s a madhouse today, for the holiday; he sees more people than he can count wearing t-shirts bearing the emblem of his shield. It’s probably a mistake to go outside at all, today, but it’s his birthday and Bucky is here and he’s feeling mulish.

“Thanks,” he says when the car stops in front of the museum, and goes through the totally useless ritual of paying him before stepping out and holding the door open for Bucky, who pushes himself over and steps out without saying a word.

“Happy Fourth,” Steve says to the driver before he closes the door behind him. Bucky doesn’t react.

“All right,” Steve says, and walks forward to the doors, which are blocked by a large _Closed_ sign. He taps on the glass, and a woman in a dark pantsuit hurries over, unlocking it for them.

“Hello, Mr. Rogers,” she says, smiling broadly up at them, face creasing. “I’m so glad you could make it.”

“Thanks,” Steve says. “It was really nice of you to do this, I know you guys must get a ton of people in here today, given everything—”

She waves him away. “No, no, we just closed a little early. For you? It is nothing. And on your birthday!”

Bucky pauses, and looks at him.

“Yeah, it’s a little too good to be true,” Steve says to her. “You can’t make this stuff up, I guess.”

“Very poetic,” she says, smiling. “Well, please, take your time. You have free reign, if you will. I will be here if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” he says again, and turns to Bucky, raising his eyebrows and moving his head toward the escalators.

They ride up in silence. “This is a lot different from when we were kids,” Steve says, looking around as they go up. “I mean, it’s not like we ever went to anything. But. It’s changed a lot.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, just watches the white walls go by.

“It gets weirder the farther you go,” Steve says when they get off at the top floor, stepping into a room full of paintings that are just slightly off, too bright, too flat, things shaped slightly wrong. “I like the stuff at the beginning, though. And I like the building. And they’ve got some stuff like—yeah, here.” _Starry Night_. “You see that everywhere now, on—computer cases and magnets and stuff, but—I think it’s still pretty amazing.” Bucky isn’t really looking at it, though, he can tell; he’s tugging at the hem of his shirt with the fingers of his right hand.

“It always makes me think of the war,” Steve tells him, which is true, but not exactly what he meant to say. Bucky does look at him then, and at the painting, but only for a second.

They keep moving, straight on by _The Persistence of Memory_ and onto Picasso. “This stuff I remember, too,” Steve says, looking over at Bucky. “There’s lots of other stuff downstairs that’s just—well, you’ll see. I never thought Picasso would seem, I dunno. Old and familiar.”

 

  
But Bucky is looking at all the naked women with their strange jumbled faces, and then he turns away, shoulders stiff. Steve looks back at the painting, at the figures with their unnatural eyes, the strange lines of their bodies, and says, “Well, actually, let’s go look at this one over here,” trying to remember what in the next room he could plausibly be leading them to.

He takes them down to the next floor, through the strange ephemera of the mid-century—Bucky actually stops dead in his tracks at the sight of a snow shovel hanging from the ceiling, and looks at Steve with an expression of disdainful perplexity so eloquent that Steve almost bursts out laughing. “Yeah, I know,” he says. “Don’t look at me, I was frozen the whole time they were cooking up all this crap. Come on, this way.”

Bucky follows along obediently, as he tends to, unsettlingly, while Steve peers into various rooms and leads them past Warhols and Pollocks and Lichtensteins. “Here,” he says finally, turning into a room, and standing aside to let Bucky pass him.

He stops in his tracks.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I thought you might like these.”

The Rothkos are huge, practically floor to ceiling, layer upon layer of paint: orange, green, black, blue, yellow, red. “I like these,” Steve says after a while, looking around. “I don’t like a lot of this new stuff, but—I like these. They’re not even the best ones, really. Well, there are a couple I like better, other places.”

Bucky walks slowly around the room, left arm hanging slightly too heavily at his side, pulling his shoulder down. Steve is used to him looking vacuously in front of him, not focusing on much of anything, except his own nightmares. But now he’s gazing intently at each of the paintings, frowning—getting, frankly, too close to them. Steve isn’t about to stop him. He still isn’t as close to them as they were to all those other paintings all those years ago.

  


  
He stops in front of one that’s practically black on black, and grips his left arm with his right hand. Steve walks to stand next to him, and looks up at it, too. “I’m gonna sit down,” he says, and goes back to the bench in the middle of the room, looking at the painting, and then, too, at Bucky looking at the painting, which is frankly more interesting.

Bucky stands staring for another moment before turning to look at him, and then slowly comes to sit down next to him. He opens his mouth and closes it again; wet his lips.

“You were an artist,” he says, and looks at Steve out of the corners of his eyes.

“No,” Steve says. “They always—blow that out of proportion. I drew things sometimes. That was all.”

Bucky just looks at him, and Steve smiles, because something about it is very—Bucky. He’s never known how to explain to anybody that Bucky was the visionary, that Bucky was the one who could imagine them somewhere other than where they were, who dreamed that things would get better, could be different. Bucky was the flame Steve was chasing for his whole childhood, his whole adolescence—and he was wrong, in the end, about things getting better. But he sure was right that they were going to be different.

“I liked art,” he says, looking at his feet where they’re kicked out in front of them. “That’s all.”

Bucky’s looking at him when he glances back up, with a look in his eye that Steve isn’t sure he knows how to identify. “I know,” he says finally. “I remember.”

Steve turns away again, incapable of keeping his gaze for too long. “That’s good,” he says instead, uselessly, rubbing a hand along his pants.

“I remember a station on the underground,” Bucky says suddenly, eyes narrowing, and Steve starts to laugh, feeling his face heating.

“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Of _all_ things.”

“Not the—details,” Bucky says haltingly, though his eyes are still sharp, shrewd. “Just—you. Very—uncomfortable.”

“You were—narrating the Elgin Marbles,” Steve says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Really—graphically.”

Bucky blinks, leans back.

“There’s a centaur involved,” Steve says sheepishly, even though that had been _entirely Bucky’s fault_. “It was—not Captain America-appropriate.”

“Probably why I did it,” Bucky says, as though it’s that straightforward, and Steve smiles, aching.

“Yeah,” he says. “Probably.”

Bucky turns back to the painting. “Did he kill himself?” he asks suddenly, and Steve stares.

“Yeah,” he says a long minute later. “I—yeah.”

Bucky says nothing, just nods once, and gets up.

 

*****

 

When they get back out onto the street, Steve having thanked the woman at the front profusely, the streets are crowded with the young, the raucous; nobody recognizes either of them, even though Bucky’s dressed oddly, and everybody’s wearing Steve’s banner on their breast. Bucky sticks close to Steve’s side.

“You wanna call a car?” Steve asks him, and he shakes his head.

They walk, instead, down the island, ambling along hot sidewalks, through Gramercy and the East Village, bars that Bucky would be frequenting now if everything—literally, everything—had happened differently. As it is they just walk, not talking, watching everyone running around them, little kids trying and failing to eat ice cream without dripping it on the ground, their parents trying to corral them, twenty-somethings dressed in hardly any clothes looking for trouble. It’s been a long time since Steve has done this, walked all the way down Manhattan and over the bridge, back home: he’s been busy, with so many things, for such a very long time. But he remembers, now, walking across these wooden slats seventy years ago, Bucky jogging in front of him, backwards, while he walked, rolling his eyes.

“Come _on_ , Steve,” Bucky had said, making exaggerated running gestures. “Come _on_ , come _on_ , we’re going on an adventure in Manhattan—”

“We’re going to end up sick in a gutter,” Steve told him, and Bucky just grinned, blinding.

“Better than passed out in an alley,” he said, and Steve laughed—

He looks over at Bucky, who’s looking up at the darkening sky, and out at the dirty water. His hair is pulled back today and his jaw is sharp but not clenched. Steve looks away.

It’s dark by the time they finally get home. Steve looks at the time and says, “You want to go up to the roof to watch the fireworks?”

Bucky blinks at him.

Steve raises his eyebrows.

He slides the window open and ducks out onto the fire escape, looking back into room as Bucky comes slowly toward him, looking hesitant. “Come on,” he says. “We’re basically there anyway.”

They are, in fact, basically there: all you had to do to get up to the roof from their top floor apartment was climb up a couple of steps and take the last one over. Steve watches as Bucky follows, and straightens up next to him, looking around hesitantly.

“Here we are,” Steve says. “Manhattan’s that way. They’re over the Hudson but you can still see them.”

They sit down, leaning against the edge, and look toward the city. Bucky rubs at the hem of his shirt again.

“I didn’t get you anything,” he says suddenly, many minutes later, and Steve starts.

“What?” he says stupidly.

“I didn’t—get you anything,” Bucky says, looking ashamed. “It’s your—it’s your birthday.”

Steve stares at him.

“I—Bucky,” he says. “I don’t—I don’t _care_.”

Bucky does something that might be a shadow of a smile. “I didn’t—remember—until—until—”

“Bucky,” Steve says. “I—come _on_.”

He just turns away, shoulders trembling minutely.

“Neither of us made it out of the war with a lot of… stuff,” Steve says, quietly, a long moment later. “I didn’t make it out with any people, either. I dunno, I think I did all right, this year.”

Bucky curls down over himself, face pressed against his knees. Steve tentatively leans down over him, moving as slowly as he can, in case—in case—but when his body lines up against Bucky’s, Bucky presses back against him, hard, shuddering. They are both very warm. It’s just as hot as it was that night all those years ago—hotter, probably, but Steve can take it better now. He curls an arm around Bucky and Bucky clutches at it with his good hand.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We did go to Europe, and we didn’t stay in that shithole of a building our whole lives—”

Bucky lets out a hysterical sob, and digs his fingers into Steve’s arm so hard he feels himself start to bruise. He lays his head down on the back of Bucky’s neck.

“And the war ate us and spat us out,” he continues. “And somehow we came back from the dead.”

“I wish I didn’t,” Bucky chokes out, and Steve closes his eyes.  
  
“I know,” he says. “I know.”

He shifts awkwardly in Steve’s arms and collapses against him, looking drained and awful in a way he hasn’t ever since coming back—and it’s good, Steve knows, curling an arm around him. It’s good.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Bucky’s eyes close for a moment before he reaches out and takes Steve’s free hand in his, fingers warm and sweaty.

“Oh, look,” Steve says a moment later, when the fireworks start, spectacular in the distance. Bucky sits up, still leaning most of his body against Steve’s, and they watch in silence for a long moment, listening to people on the surrounding roofs _ooh_ ing and _ahh_ ing with every successive burst. Bucky looks over at him and smiles, watery.

“They’re celebrating your birthday,” he says, and Steve laughs so hard he starts to cry, and has to turn his face into Bucky’s shoulder, to hide his tears, and muffle the noise amidst the thundering cracks in the distance. Bucky rests his chin on his head, hand coming up slowly to rest on his back, and Steve makes no move to move away. He’s seen fireworks before. He’ll see them again. The set them off every year for his birthday, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/).


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